Wilder Girls Read online

  “I don’t think she cares about that.”

  There’s a moment as we adjust, me with my back tucked against the wall, and Byatt flat on hers, taking up most of the bunk. We’ve slept like this since the start of the Tox, first to stay warm, and then just because we got used to it.

  “You could refuse the spot,” she says once we’re settled.

  “I might’ve,” I say sharply, “if she’d asked.” But the anger doesn’t last. I sigh, shut my eye. “I just don’t know how, with her.”

  Byatt makes a small noise. “Thank goodness I’m here, huh?”

  “You have no idea.” Some days it’s fine. Others it nearly breaks me. The emptiness of the horizon, and the hunger in my body, and how will we ever survive this if we can’t survive each other? “We’re gonna make it. Tell me we’re gonna make it.”

  “The cure’s coming,” Byatt says. “We’re gonna make it. I promise.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Taylor was right. When Welch wakes me the next morning, it’s before sunup. My eye’s gummy with sleep, leaving me blind, and it takes me a beat to put her together.

  “What’s going on?” I say. She gives me an extra shake.

  “Downstairs, quick as you can. We’re heading out.”

  The door clicks shut behind her. Reese is still asleep up on her bunk, but Byatt rolls over and pushes up onto her elbows.

  “You’re going?” she says, voice heavy and hoarse.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. You’ll be careful.”

  It’s an order, and I smile a little in case she can see. “I’ll try.”

  Welch is waiting with Carson and Julia by the time I get to the closet outside the kitchen. Carson’s missing three fingernails after a flare-up had her scratching at the infirmary door, and Julia’s deep brown skin is spattered with bruises that grow every day. Nobody’s sure what puts them there, only that their color never fades.

  Julia and Carson aren’t the first Boat Shift girls. Taylor, whose place I took, was the last left of the original team. She got picked with Emily and Christine, twins from some school down near DC who were here on exchange. They were only supposed to be here for a semester. They chose the wrong one. About three months into the Tox, they came back from the woods with their names torn out of their heads. The Tox took who they were, took everything except how to hold a knife. It made them stick each other in the main hall during dinner, made them watch themselves bleed dry.

  Carson smiles at me as I get close. She’s wearing a second jacket, this one heavy and lined with flannel, and she’s got her hair tucked up under her hood. Next to her, Julia is bent in front of the closet, pulling out things for her and I guess for me.

  “Here.” She stuffs a bundle of clothes into my arms and sits, kicking off her boots to pull on more socks. “Get that on.”

  The coat is somewhere between black and navy, with big brass clasps across the front, like on some kind of steamer trunk. It fits pretty well, and with the collar flipped up, I won’t feel the wind on my neck. There’s also a red hat, the kind with flaps over the ears, but I’m not convinced it’ll fit, so I look up at Welch, and she’s got a red scarf. So does Carson. And Julia, standing now and frowning impatiently, has a red puffy vest on over her jacket.

  “The color’s easy to spot,” Welch says. She’s fiddling with a walkie-talkie hooked on her belt, one that must connect her back to Headmistress’s radio. “So we can find one another, just in case.”

  Julia snorts. “And everything else can find us too. Come on, Hetty, put it on. We have to go.”

  It shouldn’t, but it surprises me when Welch presses a bowie knife into my hands and shows me how to slip it through the belt loops on my jeans just like Julia and Carson do with theirs. The knife is all I’ll get for now, but like Welch, Julia has a gun. Not a rifle like we use on the roof, but a snug little pistol that she seems to know her way around.

  “All set?” Welch says, and nods at me. “Behind Julia. Stay close.”

  We go out the front doors and onto the path. I turn around just to see the house, to remember, and it’s like I’m thirteen again, climbing out of the van and coming up the walkway with Byatt half a step behind me. The big doors, the porch, and everything feeling like it’s about to be something.

  At the fence we stop and wait for Welch to pull it open. It’s wrought iron, the bars close enough together that you can’t slide through, not even if you suck in hard, and it’s been up since the school was built some hundred years ago. Built to keep the manicured grounds separate from the wildwood, built to keep the animals from finding their way into the trash. Built, too, I suppose, to keep the girls inside, on the grounds. As if there was anywhere else on this island to go.

  But since the Tox, the trees have crept closer, new saplings springing up, stretching through the fence like they’re reaching for us. Pines, some of them, dead needles dusting the frozen ground, and others, too, scaled and gnarled like nothing else. They grow right up against the iron, and their branches reach up and over the fence before dipping low, loaded with berries the color of blood. Nobody will eat them. When they break open, their insides are black and oozing.

  There’s only one place where the trees pull away from the fence, and that’s on the north side of the island, right where the shore drops off at a twenty-foot cliff. Everywhere else we’ve hacked back what we could and built up the fence with everything we could get our hands on, everything we could spare.

  The woods are bad enough—I’d swear they want us for their own—but when the animals come, they come fast. The coyotes, grown bigger than wolves. The foxes that hunt now in vicious packs. Too fast for the Gun Shift girls sometimes, and so we’ve studded the fence with glass shards and the lids off used soup cans. Boarded up the gaps with bulletin boards torn off classroom walls.

  We don’t keep a girl stationed at the fence. Too close to the woods, too tempting for any of the animals, and we don’t need one anyway. Instead, the gate opens easy and locks behind you as you leave. The only way back in is with the matching iron key dangling from Welch’s belt.

  The gate inches open and we sidle through the narrow gap. When Welch shuts it again, you can hear the lock slide home, and it sounds so flimsy, like I could break it just by thinking about it. Is this really all that’s keeping us safe?

  “Ready?” says Welch. She doesn’t wait to see if I am. We start walking.

  The road is dirt, with roots and weeds bleeding through the edges, and potholes filled in with rocks by Reese’s dad, Mr. Harker. I’ve spent a year and a half staring at it from the roof, but I forgot what it feels like under my feet, frozen through, crunching like spun sugar. My breath in clouds, a snap in the air, and it was fall a week ago, but today it’s nothing but winter.

  Above us the pines stumble up to the sky. Taller than they should be, trunks broader, branches splitting a thousand times and the canopy filtering what sun there is, turning the light muddy and clinging. It all feels forgotten, like we’re the first people here in a hundred years. No tire tracks left on the road, no sign this was ever anything but what it is now.

  We shouldn’t be here. This place isn’t ours anymore.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t think I ever realized how much sound we make at the house, but I figure it out after a few minutes on the road. It’s so quiet that you can hear the woods; you can hear them growing and moving and you can hear the things growing and moving inside them. Deer, small before the Tox and so big now they could feed us for weeks, if their meat weren’t rotten and dying. Coyotes, and I’ve heard wolves, though I’ve never seen one. Other things, too, that never show themselves. The Tox didn’t just happen to us. It happened to everything.

  Moss layering thick carpets across the ground, vines spiraling high. Here and there, patches of flowers growing strong, even in the cold. They’re i
rises, vivid indigo petals coated with frost, a cluster in the middle gathered close with a skirt of petals draping down. They grow all over the island, all year round, and we used to have a vase of them in practically every room of the house. Raxter Irises, special for the way their petals darken once they’re picked. Like Raxter Blues. And now like us.

  Before the quarantine it wasn’t like this. The animals felt practically tame, even if we did get lectures about storing food properly to keep it from them, and the woods felt different, felt like they were ours. Pines, growing in ranks, but the soil so thin and their trunks like needles so that if you stood in the right place, you could pretty much see from one end of the island to the other. You never forgot the ocean because the air was always tangy with salt. Here in the thickness, you only get a spark of it now and then.

  The way it happened is that the woods got it first. That’s what I think, anyway. Even before the wilderness reached inside us, it was seeping into the earth. The trees were growing taller, new saplings springing up faster than they had any right to. And it was fine; it was nothing worth noticing, until I looked out the window and couldn’t see the Raxter I knew anymore. That morning two girls tore each other’s hair out over breakfast with an animal viciousness, and by afternoon the Tox had hit us.

  This part of the road runs arrow-straight, footprints dotted across it from a year and a half of Boat Shift girls making the trip. On either side there’s nothing. Nothing left of the small paths that used to scurry off into the trees. No sign of anybody else. All I can find are long, raw stripes ripped in the tree trunks. Claws, maybe, or teeth.

  I expected it to be different. I watch the trees attack the fence, the dark between them thick and reaching. I know what the Tox does. But I thought something of my old life would still be here. I thought something of us would have survived.

  “Come on,” Welch says, and I realize I’ve slowed down, the others a few yards ahead. “We have to keep moving.”

  I wonder what’s left of Reese’s house. It would be off to the right somewhere, tucked in among the reeds. I never learned the way myself, always let Reese lead. It took her a long time to invite us over, and even once she had, it never quite felt like we were supposed to be there. Reese and her dad, laughing and talking as Byatt picked at her food, and I didn’t know what to do so I smiled the whole time.

  Somewhere behind us there’s a crash and then a kind of bleating, high and quick, and I can’t help the curse that drops from my mouth. Welch throws herself against the nearest tree, dragging me with her to lie flat between the roots. Across the road, Carson and Julia press into a hollow in the thicket, crouch low, heads bent together.

  “What—”

  “Shhh,” Welch whispers. “Don’t move.”

  On the roof it was different, just branches and the sight of my rifle. But I can feel the shake in the earth. Heavy, churning steps. My mouth goes dry, fear shivering through my body, and I bite my lip to keep quiet.

  Pressed to the ground next to Welch, the pine tree’s sprawling roots twisting around us, I catch a glimpse. First a hulking mass of shadow, and then as it prowls into view, I see it. Fur rippling like long grass. Too big for a coyote, too dark for a bobcat. A black bear.

  I know what I’m supposed to do if it sees us. Grizzlies are different, but with a black bear, you make noise, stare it down. Don’t run. Fight back. That’s the lecture we got after Mr. Harker saw one digging through his trash. They’re faster than they look, he said, and they can spot a flash of color in the brush.

  I snatch off my red hat and smother it under my coat, sweat freezing on my scalp. Count the beats of my racing heart, try not to breathe too loud.

  Next to me Welch smiles, just a smudge of one, like she can’t help it. We stay there for I don’t know how long. Wait until the footsteps have passed, the trees stilled, the noise faded, and then she stands up, pulls me with her.

  “It’s gone,” she says. “You can put your hat on again.”

  She calls out to Carson and Julia. They come jogging through the branches looking like they didn’t just have the life scared out of them, like they see this kind of thing all the time.

  “Having fun?” Julia asks. I think she might be serious.

  * * *

  —

  Raxter is only about five miles long, give or take, shaped like a bullet with the tip pointing west, but we’re moving slow so it takes us a while to get to the other end. You can tell as we start getting close; all the trees rear back from the shore like they’re afraid of it. Up ahead somewhere, hidden from view by the last of the woods, is the visitors’ center. It was built even before the school, used to be the headquarters for some local fishing company until the lobsters disappeared and it got converted. Before the Tox it was always empty and closed up except during summers, and even then it was just Mr. Harker, sitting behind the counter and listening to a Sox game while tourists passed by on ferries, headed to other towns, other islands.

  At last the woods start to thin, and ahead I can see the open stretch of the salt marsh. In the distance, maybe a half mile out, the ocean is gray and rough, the horizon empty like it always is.

  “Oh,” I say, before I can stop myself.

  Welch frowns at me. “What?”

  “I just thought they’d be waiting for us.”

  Nobody answers me, so I swallow my disappointment and fall into single file with them, me between Carson and Julia, as Welch leads us out of the cover of the trees. Immediately, the wind is stinging, so strong it just about knocks me over. I shove my hat in my coat pocket and edge closer to Julia, hope she’ll take some of the worst of it for me.

  The road here is scrubbed flat, and on either side the ground drops off into reeds and soupy pools of mud. To the right I can see the remains of the boardwalk that used to lead from the pier to the visitors’ center, winding through the marsh and the woods, dotted with informational plaques that don’t seem to be there anymore. I want to ask what’s happened to them. But the answer would be the same as everything else: the Tox.

  We stay on the road, and it’s a slow walk until we hit the start of the ferry pier, ragged old red tape fluttering across the entrance. Everybody said at the beginning that they were planning a wall, a real one, with metal and plastic to see through, but this was the most they ever did. Some tape and a sign that says “Wait until area has been cleared.”

  We stop here, and Welch drops her bag on the ground and digs around in it. She comes up with a pair of binoculars, stares through them at the horizon.

  “What do we do now?” I say, knocking one foot against the other to shake off the cold.

  “Usually,” Carson starts, “we have to wait a while. But so—”

  And then a bird chirps. I whip around, checking the trees, my depth perception slipping as my eye fights to adjust. “What the hell was that?”

  The birds stopped singing right when we got sick, went quiet like they’d never been there at all. As the days passed we watched them fly away, herons and gulls and starlings flying forever south. I haven’t heard one in so long I’d forgotten what they sound like.

  “Oh, good,” Welch says. “They’re almost here.”

  I’m still wondering why the bird doesn’t seem strange to anyone else when a foghorn kind of noise blasts from out on the water. I jump, my heartbeat ratcheting up, breath sharp in my lungs.

  “Where is it?” I say.

  It’s a clear enough day, the sun up somewhere behind the gray sky. You can see the shore from here, a smear way out across the waves. And in between, no boat, no ship.

  “Just wait.”

  “But I don’t see.”

  Another foghorn, and the others look ready, like this is the way it’s supposed to be, and then, out of the gray, like it’s pushing through some great fog, the prow of a ship.

  It’s a tug with a blunt nose an
d a faded hull. Too big to get close on our side of the island, but the ferry pier is just right, jutting out over deep water. I recognize the ID stamp as the tug swings closer, the white number and the stripes of yellow and blue on the stack. I saw these sometimes in Norfolk. Navy-issue, they mean, from Camp Nash on the coast.

  The wake is just hitting the shore as the ship turns, and if I squint, I can make out two people, bigger than they should be in bright-colored suits, moving around on the flat tail of the deck. The ship is turning, the motor getting louder and louder until Carson crams her fingers in her ears. There’s a big orange crane near the back—I can make it out now—and it’s lifting, extending, and we watch it hoist a pallet from the deck, over and out across the water, to the end of the pier.

  The crane releases and the pallet crashes down. Under us the pier boards shudder. I take a step forward, but Julia throws her arm across my chest.

  “They have to give the all clear,” she says.

  The hook has released and the crane’s retracting, and the two people are just standing there on the deck, looking at us, and I’m waiting for one of them to wave or something when the horn goes off, and it’s so close and so big that we just stand there, mouths open, let it wash over us.

  Eventually, it stops, and I take a gasping gulp of fresh air.

  “Now we can go,” Julia says.

  The water’s slapping against the supports as the wake gets bigger, now the tug is moving fast again. Two seagulls land noisily on the railing of the pier. They’re watching us, watching the supplies the boat left. Here to scavenge, to get what they can. They must follow the tug from the mainland.

  Now that we’re closer I can see that there’s a lot in this delivery. And I mean a lot, more than what they usually carry back. The pallet is covered with wooden cartons, all nailed shut, and on top of those are five or six bags, the kind Boat Shift always come home with.